Oooh, oooh. A seriously interesting article. Robert X. Cringely on why Moore's law might extend for another 15 years.
This extra chip heat comes generally from four sources. The first is simply reduced surface area; yes the voltage is lower, but if the ratio of old voltage to new voltage is less than the ratio of old surface area to new surface area from the previous product generation and manufacturing process, well then the chip simply has to get hotter, since it is dramatically smaller yet doing the same work. Voltages drop linearly while surface areas decrease as a far more rapid square function.
The second reason chips -- especially microprocessors -- are getting hotter is the demands of keeping various clocks in sync. Using synchronous logic, some significant percentage of transistors is required simply to keep all the clock signals aligned on a 400 million transistor chip. Asynchronous -- clockless -- logic can do away with the need for that extra, power-wasting circuitry, as I wrote about in this space many years ago (it's in this week's links). As such companies including Sun and Intel are trying to make more and more of their chip circuitry asynchronous, but that is a long and crooked path toward chips that consume no power at all in the milliseconds they aren't being used.
But the greatest producers of heat are relatively new on the scene: two forms of current leakage that are especially prevalent at feature sizes substantially below 100 nanometers. The smaller we go the tougher it gets.
The first type of current leakage is called "gate leakage," which is a quantum effect in which electrons mysteriously migrate through materials they aren't supposed to be migrating through. Gate leakage is active, meaning it takes place only when the chip is actually running. Any leakage consumes power and creates heat without doing usable work, so of course we hate it unless, like I did with my old PDP-8, you are relying on your computer to heat your house.
Cute post. Moving pictures that are actually still :
http://netmath.blogspot.com/2008/01/trigonometry.html
It has been snowing billions and billions of blistering snowflakes out here. The whole place is covered in white. It is just a different kind of beauty. A breathtakingly beautiful b school covered in billions and billions of snowflakes from a billowing blizzard. Pictures at some later point perhaps.
I went with Bill Scadlock (of guest post fame) yesterday to see Elizabeth : The Golden Age. My vote was for The Kite Runner, but since that meant waiting an extra three hours, we decided to check out Elizabeth instead. The plan appeared jinxed from the beginning. Bill forgot to bring his wallet. Then, my first credit card failed to work. Finally, we made our way to the T only to be stuck in the subway for an incredible 45 minutes. We had to run the last fifty yards to the theater.
But in the end, it was not for naught. I got a welcome break from preparing for exams. Two comments : (the movie sucks) first, it is almost anachronistic to expect to see a historical movie which aims towards historical authenticity (the movie sucks); second, and I might as well say it plainly, the movie was not only non-historical (the movie sucks), but also at times non-logical. In a word, it was awful.
While at the theater, I reminded him that he needs to fulfill his promise to oblige our readers with a guest post, something he said would be possible only after he was back "from the land of the Austragonians" (Bill was recently in Sydney). Here is a speedy guest post by Bill. Written as only Bill can.
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Choultry points to some comments by Martin and to Wikipedia's "List of Indian Monarchs". Wikipedia just got back from its celebration of the 750th anniversary of American Independence, folks, and may be a little the worse for drink,, so please bear with W.Wikipedia, the online, reader-edited encyclopedia, honored the 750th anniversary of American independence on July 25 with a special featured section on its main page Tuesday.
Folks, There are two separate things on that new and improved Wiki page, one, a list of historical kings and another, a list of kings from mythological sources. both the lists have been merged into one. beeeeautiful. One list was arrived at after careful study by students of history while the other was arrived at by people who had little historical training writing before they could spell B-L-O-G. Perhaps there is a real cause for concern here in merging these two lists.
it is not just that these are very different kinds of lists. the point of contention is that this is really a matter of Enlightenment values. the question is - should we be accepting facts on the basis of faith alone? and if we do, on the basis of which faith? and how, then, do you resolve all the contradictions and inconsistencies that arise? to be sure, There may be historical elements that may be gleaned from the Puranas, etc.. And this is not intended to say that there is no element of truth in the religious texts. In fact, IIRC, the connection between Chandragupta and Sandrakottos came via the Puranas. But, the Puranas are not history. There is really no point in pretending otherwise.
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One of the more interesting spins that I have heard on vegetarianism came from a guru who laid it out in terms of his biological theory of matter. There are, I was told, five elements that "life depends on" : the earth, water, air, ether and fire. The bones, I was informed, were made up of earth. What got me cracking up was the contention that brain matter, or the mind, was made up of "space". I have always been really interested in vegetarianism. I was vegetarian once, and a lot of my friends are vegetarian. Rationales for a vegetarian diet range from religious reasons to ethical ones to politicophilosophical ones. Among my friends too, motivations for vegetarianism and veganism seem to range across the spectrum. A friend of mine turned vegan after reading "A Diet for a New America". Another turned vegan because of his Berkeley-acquired political beliefs. Many of the vegetarians I know are vegetarian for religious and ethical reasons, but many of them have remained vegetarian because they just never acquired a taste for non-vegetarian food.
There have been some new arguments about vegetarianism in terms of minimizing land use. The argument is that a low-fat vegetarian diet is more efficient in terms of land use than a typical non-vegetarian one. This line of reasoning is, no doubt, sound. New research conducted in the state of New York has, however, indicated that while "a low-fat vegetarian diet is very efficent in terms of how much land is needed to support it", it may possible that in certain cases the efficiency of a vegetarian diet may be improved. The numbers quoted are applicable only to the state of New York. The argument, however, might be fairly globally applicable.A low-fat vegetarian diet is very efficient in terms of how much land is needed to support it. But adding some dairy products and a limited amount of meat may actually increase this efficiency, Cornell researchers suggest.
This deduction stems from the findings of their new study, which concludes that if everyone in New York state followed a low-fat vegetarian diet, the state could directly support almost 50 percent more people, or about 32 percent of its population, agriculturally. With today's high-meat, high-dairy diet, the state is able to support directly only 22 percent of its population, say the researchers.
The reason is that fruits, vegetables and grains must be grown on high-quality cropland, he explained. Meat and dairy products from ruminant animals are supported by lower quality, but more widely available, land that can support pasture and hay. A large pool of such land is available in New York state because for sustainable use, most farmland requires a crop rotation with such perennial crops as pasture and hay.